Like Frost on a Windowpane: On the Pluriversal Possibilities of Spacetime

David M. Grant, University of Northern Iowa.^[1]

(Published June 12, 2020)

Consider watching a baseball game from a distance. We see the ball thrown, the batter hitting it, and as spectators, we watch the ball arc over the midfield. Only later are we struck by the sound of the bat striking the ball. These two moments of sensation are linked across a spatiotemporal passage. They are distinct arrivals combined in our bodies to form a singular event, a reduction of pluriversal possibility to universal meaning. In some sense, the light bouncing off a ball arcing over the field exists as the future of the soundwaves, an ocular arrival alien to our sounding body. Narrative is made from these non-unitary sensory relations. Yet, in the flow and flux of experience, a subsequent event may change an initial perception in a way not amenable to narrative reflection or control. In our baseball example, the temporality of sight, that privileged theoresai of Aristotle’s rhetoric, gives way to other temporally distinct phenomena that hold potential to confirm or disconfirm our perception of some event’s unfolding. From a standard eurowestern physics viewpoint, the phenomena of our environment move at different speeds relative to us.

I argue here that the difference between those velocities holds capacity for rhetorical invention and a more ecological sense of the kairotic. Rhetorical scholars are turning toward more relational ontologies in order to model ecological theories of persuasion and influence. In ecological becomings, nodes and links are never stable. Each processurally morphs and adapts to others. Identifying information about those nodes and links is never totalizable. This poses different potentials for not only meaning-making and persuasive influence but also for understanding what Byron Hawk argues is “a single object of study— quasi-objects coproduced through perpetual movements of composition” (21). As Hawk reads Michael Serres, a quasi-object is “primarily relational; it is largely constituted via social relation and circulation” (22). Our partial knowledge of quasi-objects stems not from a limit or deficiency in our ability to measure or define them, but from an ontological framework that is not universal, but differential, perhaps pluriversal. That is, as decolonial and new materialist scholars have proposed, we meet across pluriversal dimensions, which are not alternatives to one another, but each replete with “options, rather than alternatives, and . . . in an effort to pluriversalize rhetorics without universalizing or authenticating another alternative approach to rhetoric” (Cushman et al. 2). That is, the very ontological conditions of our meeting and rhetorical exchange do not follow the same laws or rules. There is no singular way of being.

Relations, in this sense, are not those things that obtain between things already in existence. Rather, the existence of things emerges from relations that pre-exist them. As Karen Barad puts it, “relations do not follow relata, but the other way around” (136-7). Only by being-in-relation can something exist. Articulations of ideas, geologic uplifts, and shimmers of fish scales all emerge from relations. Prior to emergence, relations hold certain capacities or potentials for emergence or not. Intense relations may hold greater potential than mild or distant ones. But ithe potential and capacity among relations are the real endekhomenon pithanon, the possible or available means of persuasion. The phenomena of discourse that they manifest are secondary.

Such attunement toward potential and capacity, as Steph Ceraso points out, suggests that the ways rhetors relate to and integrate with their surroundings is forever multimodal. Such multimodality is not a set of discrete sensory modes but a question of “how sound is connected to and intertwined with different senses, spaces, and objects” (Ceraso 6). It is not a question of either sound or sight but the inventive capacity in the relations between them. We encounter the event of the baseball game in a duration and through the relations between our various sensory apparatus.

I want to look toward the duration between moments and into the confounding separation between lightning flash and thunder. I explore this as part of working through what rhetoric may hold for ontologies that are inherently pluriversal and relational. Separating the sensory moments we normally fuse into a singular event undoes our usual perception of a universal spacetime, allows us to more carefully track the registers of time and how they shape pluriversal possibilities. This may seem inhuman, yet like so many contemporary scholars working on “wicked problems” in and of the Anthropocene, my aim looks to improve human encounters with the more-than and non-human. This is a strange and alien phenomenology—quite literally—and I draw on the history of such ideas in rhetorical theory.

I begin by reading “pluriverse” diffractively between new materialist and decolonial projects. I do so to show that although there is a shared ontological term, they are not exactly the same. A diffractive reading allows a pattern of non-appropriative relations to emerge. I explain non-appropriative rhetorics with Diane Davis’s example from the “Darmok” episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation before turning to my own analysis of Ted Chiang’s speculative short fiction, “The Story of Your Life.” The story’s protagonist, Dr. Louise Banks, is gifted an inhuman technology that allows her to sense across time. I turn from this imaginary to the physical through Karen Barad’s more recent work on queer trans*materialities and how the virtual is actualized from the future to the present. Through these, I reorient the rhetor away from an active agent consciously appropriating and manipulating possible means in a universal, unidirectional spacetime. I offer instead non-appropriative encounters within different flows of time. I conclude by connecting such encounters with Mark Rifkin’s study of how settler colonial time reduces political capacities among colonized people. Ultimately, I argue that attunement to different temporalities as we engage with our surround offers potential for rhetorics that work in and across pluriversal ontologies. 

Pluriverse

Both decolonial and new materialist scholars use the term “pluriverse” to suggest that there are multiple, ultimately incommensurate worlds inhabited by subjects and collectives. It is important to acknowledge, as Walter Mignolo does, that “pluriversality is not cultural relativism, but the entanglement of several cosmologies connected today in a power differential” (qtd. in Reiter x). The emphasis is on cosmology—on how our environment is not just composed, but how it operates, and on the more-than-human forces that inhabit it. For anthropologists Marisol de la Cadena and Mario Blaser, pluriverse is characterized by “heterogenous worldings coming together as a political ecology of practices, negotiating their difficult being together in heterogeneity” (4). The #NODAPL protests made vivid the ways mechanical pumps, pipelines, and police water cannons mingled with prophecies of black snakes and the wood smoke of inipi rituals as part of a tense and often violent heterogeneity. Arturo Escobar, on the other hand, ties the term more explicitly with the Zapatistas of Mexico and other “epistemologies of the south” that hold “that the diversity of the world is infinite; succinctly, the world is made up of multiple worlds, multiple ontologies or reals that are far from being exhausted by the eurocentric experience or being reducible to it” (68). Like Mignolo, Escobar forwards a universal pluriversality and one within the Zapatista vision of buen vivir with its infinitely diverse conviviality.

Bruno Latour paints the pluriverse more discursively. In Politics of Nature, Latour defines pluriverses as “propositions* that are candidates for common existence before the process of unification in the common world*” (246, asterisks in original).^[2] Comparatively, “common world” is defined as “the provisional result of the progressive unification of external realities (for which we reserve the term ‘pluriverse’*)” (239). In the text itself, Latour proposes “something that might be called the pluriverse* to mark the distinction between the notion of external reality and the properly political work of unification” (40). This should not be mistaken for social construction, as Latour makes abundantly clear. Rather, propositions are just as material as the worlds from which they emerge. Thus, they mark different practices of inhabitation and dwelling not through representation, but through their proposals to be and the resultant acceptance, denial, or renegotiation of the proposal.

This means that Latour’s propositions* are under the auspices of some future hope for unification. Thomas Mercier characterizes Latour’s political ontology, as “a conflictual pluralization of world-making practices [which] does indeed allow for a salutary decentralization of Western imperialism. However, anchoring this pluralizing effort within an ontology remains highly problematic.” In essence, Latour’s political ontology still carries with it a unitary commons or a compositionism. Even in Down to Earth, Latour’s political ontology puts together agonistic propositions rather than the more open equanimity Escobar describes with buen vivir.

Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that rhetorical scholars working with Latour have not dug too deeply into the pluriverse relative to other concepts like flat ontology, dingpolitik, or actor-network theory.  Where pluriversal rhetorics do abound, then, is in decolonial projects and on decolonial terms. Pluriversal accounts are consonant with transrhetorical movements (Jackson) and help forward rhetorics emerging from indigenous and mesitza consciousness (Romeo and Baca; Cushman et al.). These look to make space for the many rhetorical traditions in which the eurowestern conversation traced back to classical Athens and the ancient Eastern Mediterranean is but one among many. If Latour is right that the propositions and practices of world-making are ontological, then these ontologies are not to be read against the universalizing eurocentric model, but alongside it. Although Latour’s use of pluriverse seems still closely wedded to—even as it tries to escape—an ontology where the procedural alignments between propositions of eurowestern science hold, the point of decolonial pluriversality is to refuse admittance of an easy transposition among contextual frames so that our collective might inch closer toward an uncommon buen vivir.

Each articulation of pluriverse, however, posits a heterogenous ontology where matter and meaning cannot be reduced to a sameness. That is, each is to be regarded in its own being and relational aspects rather than forced into status as object. For Latour, grasping an object as a tool for use depends on the object’s conformity to the ontology of the grasper. It is as if one looks for a hammer but finds a stone, and, grasping the stone, the grasper asks a question: “Will you suffice as a hammer?” Moreover, the grasp is not an instant, but an ongoing relation as each blow with the rock is an opportunity for the grasper or the rock to continue or dissolve the agreement. The rock may break, and the sufficiency is dissolved. Or, the grasper may hurt their hand or some other circumstance may break the temporary constitution.

Rather than propositions, decolonial approaches “story” such articulations. Different ontologies are suffused with cultural histories, understandings, previous alliances, and tales of those involved. Often this information does not appear directly but is made possible by previous generations’ contributions to the story. Such stories are less juridical, as we will see with Rifkin’s analysis. This is important because stories change the context for understanding from rights to what is or should be right. Whether storied or juried, what’s at stake is a manner of relating without appropriation, a form of prehending reality that does not possess it. One may touch, but only with proper permission.

Possibly and Pluriversally Available

We can get at such non-appropriative movement through Diane Davis’s critique of Steven Mailloux’s hermeneutic rhetoric in the use of the Tamarian language in Star Trek: The Next Generation (Davis, Inessential Solidarity). Davis insists on a rhetoric that includes a manner of non-appropriative meaning demonstrated in the exchanges between Captain Picard and the Tamarian, Dathon, who can only speak allegorically. That is, there is no unification in the discursive exchange between Picard and his Tamarian counterpart. There is, at best, an approximation, one grounded in spatiotemporal situation. The possible means available to persuade emerge over time, each moment having a different capacity to induce suasion or conflict. Davis argues that it is not the cogito or any sense of a masterful self that is shattered and left to reassimilate itself in the encounter with an Other, but that a “preunderstanding is precisely what’s shattered in the address [of the other], which announces its own sense, an unmasterable surplus irreducible to semantic appropriations” (74).

The means of persuasion come upon Picard, arriving as he repeats the phrases to himself as he and Dathon fight a beast on the planet’s surface. This is not equivalent to knowing whether the Other can respond or we can respond to the Other, but it is an encounter that, according to Davis, “one can only undergo” (75). Such means for rhetorical exchange come upon us, not idly lying about as mere potential to be grasped and used, nor whose being is disclosed only due to our own grasping. Davis is clear to exclude the sense of prehending Latour implies with propositions, since her encounter “amounts to a depropriation that takes me out, leaving an ‘I’ without a me, or better: leaving an ‘I’ sans appropriating ego” (75). There is no assembly, only a disturbance in cognition when, for however brief a moment, the address takes and our “conceptual grids” are disabled, leaving us open to our own response-ability (75). Something wicked this way comes to us with all its inventive potential in that scramble of conceptual grids that are a precondition of rhetoricity.

Fig. 1: Dathon and Picard (Kolbe).

Kevin Porter’s consequentialist theory of discourse and meaning can help us look at the durational aspects of this response-ability and its conceptual scrambling. Porter argues that “[e]vents do not happen in space-time, but are only encountered” (74). As with Davis, we encounter rather than master events, subjecting them to our own terms. As Porter puts it, “[W]e do not experience a text, utterance, or other sign as an object first plus a meaning distinct or separable from the object” (109). Instead, we encounter it as consequential and immediate “because experience is itself temporally distended and open to the propagation of further consequences” (112). A text we encounter is not so much interpreted as “immediated” with nothing that “joins together the reader, the text, and the meaning of a text” (112). Both reader and text open to one another in an encounter, and that encounter is meaningful insofar as it has consequences. Across such frames of reference, heterogenous worldings come together, each with a different set of consequences and, hence, different unfoldings of pluriversal meaning.

Porter’s “immediation as an expropriation” is a kind of abduction in the sense Dobrin and Jensen use it, an explanation of “how our commonplace rhetorical habits invoke an unknown future in order to reinscribe the status quo in the present” (10). We are not always masters in our encounters because for Porter,  “The reader loses himself or herself by opening up to the alien consequences of texts” (116). Aliens are among us already, preceding and exceeding “our purview in every direction,” as Matthew Calarco phrases it. Our response-ability is not simply to symbolic persuasion, but within and as material as well. As Davis elsewhere proposes, “a defigured but rhetorical world . . .  opens ‘like a miracle’ as Michael Nass puts it (2015, 52), wherever some singularity—human or not, carbon based or not—manages to address some other by leaving a trace of ‘itself’” (“Rhetoricity” 434). Ecologies, circulations, and movements of quasi-objects imply not only relativity of meaning but also a relativity of matter and time, an absolute ontological relativity with different frames hopelessly entangled together like a puzzle ring designed by M. C. Escher. The pluriverse is both new materialist and decolonial, and yet it is never reducible to a proposition or set of propositions to be understood. They can only be encountered.

If we have a mangle of temporal-sensory frames in which we are entwined, then, as Jenny Edbauer suggests, endekhomenon, the possible or available means employed by a rhetor, cannot be adequately delineated by the situation (Edbauer). Rather than treat these means as a set of possibly persuasive ontological singularities whose potentials are inherent or revealed only by some procedures of mastery—kairotic aim, to-handedness, the capacity of language to trope—we might understand the availability and possibility of rhetorical means as alien arrivals with their own purposes and timeframes. This shifts our rhetorics and rhetorical pedagogies to building capacities within and for those encounters. Rather than propositions, we have only questions and queries: who and what are you?

To exemplify the pluriversal potential of encountering along the lines of spatiotemporal relativity, I turn to another speculative fiction to rethink the available means “from the rhetor out” rather than “from the situation in.” Ted Chaing is an author who has brilliantly crafted stories that articulate many of rhetoric’s pressing questions and themes, notably in his short story, “The Story of Your Life,” upon which the movie Arrival was based. Like the Darmok episode, this plays with alien abduction tropes, though it twists the plot in ways that allow for further consideration of pluriversality.

Heptapod B: A Case of Alien Temporal Abduction

In Chiang’s story, alien visitors mysteriously show up across Earth to share a technology. Rather than sharing any typical form of speculative technologies—faster-than-light travel, laser weapons, photon torpedos, etc.—Chiang’s aliens, called heptapods, share a far more basic one: writing. As a technology, writing abducts the tale’s protagonist, Dr. Louise Banks, so that she spans time through future memories. That is, similar to what Porter argues, Banks no longer moves through a series of events within space-time. She instead encounters her own life and the life of her daughter, though its parts arrive at non-linear moments. Present, past, and future are no longer temporal directions with this alien writing but a duration encountered in order to tell a story.

Banks is a linguist conscripted by the U.S. military to try and figure out how to communicate with the aliens at one of their arrival sites. Speech is not a viable mode since heptapod physiology is so different from human physiology that it is completely impossible for humans to replicate. Heptapods are seven-sided, hence their name, and sort of like starfish in that whichever direction they happen to move also happens to be “front.” Banks discovers a promising form of heptapod writing, and, as a mere matter of classification, Dr. Banks and her team distinguish alien speech from writing as Heptapod A and Heptapod B, respectively. As Dr. Banks discovers, Heptapod B has no relation to Heptapod A. It does not represent speech with each of its complex glyphs assembled from various designs, but it works through what Banks describes as “semagrams” (15). These are not logograms as in Chinese; rather, they are more like emojis in that each one is “meaningful on its own, and in combination with other semagrams, could form endless statements” (15-16). We can already hear the similarity to Linear A, the undeciphered Minoan writing system, and Linear B, the early form of Greek writing, and we can understand Chiang’s speculative framework as similar to arguments made by technologists of writing like McLuhan, Ong, Flusser, and Ulmer.

Fig 2: Heptapod Writing (Fraga). 

Surprising to Banks, the morphology and grammar of Heptapod B were “uniquely two-dimensional. Depending on a semagram’s declension, inflections could be indicated by varying a certain stroke’s curvature, or its thickness, or its manner of undulation; or by varying the relative sizes of two radicals, or their relative distance to another radical, or their orientations; or various other means” (17; see also fig. 2) As with heptapod physiology, the direction of writing doesn’t matter. In both biological shape and literate form, there is no front or back, no specified beginning or end. As Chiang has Banks describe, “The semagrams seemed to be something more than language; they were almost like mandalas. I found myself in a meditative state, contemplating the way in which premises and conclusions were interchangeable” (26). In such meditations, Banks runs up against her human tendency to temporally narrativize and run through a particular “train of thought” (26). Yet this is not the case with Heptapods whose writing and biology are both omnidirectional. As creatures whose bodies radiate out from a center, “any direction might as well be ‘forward’” (5). The relation between body and world is carried over to writing and reading Heptapod B and thence to heptapod consciousness itself.

The upshot of this technology, Dr. Banks discovers, is that learning Heptapod B alters her sensation of time. Like their physical orientation, heptapod temporal orientation is without reference to a linear sequence. There is no anterior or posterior to events, and Dr. Banks begins to experience events that have yet to transpire. More accurately, they have yet to be encountered by her physical self. They are memories of a future she can access mentally and emotionally but not yet physically. They are the seen trajectory of a baseball before she hears it hitting the bat. Banks is abducted into a different temporal frame and must then continually work across the two. This was, all along, the plan of the heptapods. The “gift” of their technology is in this very re-orientation within spacetime, a gift that might just save humans from themselves.

Crucial to the story are future memories of her daughter, the “you” to whom the story is addressed. Before conceiving her daughter, Banks remembers that at age twenty-five, her daughter will die in a tragic accident. Rather than focus on this fate and the additional foreknowledge that keeping it private will contribute to her divorce from her daughter’s father, Banks proceeds with letting her daughters’ life unfold in all its miraculousness toward its untimely end. Banks repeatedly chooses the very existence of her daughter over all other considerations, even the daughter’s death in the prime of life. Banks chooses to encounter this life, an Other, and its entanglement with her own not as anything that happens but as an encounter that scrambles her ability to order, define, and measure; as something she undergoes.

The mandala-like literacy of Heptapod B reframes Banks’s perception of the world from one of cause and effect to one of emergence, “sprouting like frost on a windowpane” (26). It is not a linear developmental sequence but is circular and expansive with varying patterns, suspended as it were, between present and future. The effects of this literacy are made more evident in Denis Villeneuve’s stylish film adaptation, Arrival, but these effects are presented simply as a given in Chiang’s story. The transference of heptapod temporal consciousness to Dr. Banks is the story’s conceit, its mystery, and its promise that keeps us reading. Like the consequences of linear phonetic writing technology, Heptapod B changes the consciousness of Louise Banks, offering us an image of a rhetoric concerned with not just space, but time. Here, the future affects the present. That is, the future is a moment in a larger duration we encounter, so what we do in the “now” affects how that future arrives.

Fig. 3: Frost on a Window (“Frost Crystals”).

As with the moment between the arrival of light and a subsequent sound, Banks inhabits an inbetween. Her ability granted from Heptapod literacy to sometimes see the sound before the light is not one where she masters the stock market or appropriates meaning from her sense of the future. Rather—wise to interconnected influences and non-human scales—she allows her daughter to undergo her own storying. Porter’s encounters with meaning and Dobrin and Jensen’s use of abduction fit well with such a rhetoric that focuses on what one remains open and available to in the space between present and future. Banks’s choice is not one of selecting what will effect change and somehow provide meaning as a supplement. It is one that remains open to and furthers a fullness of possibility. In short, she is being available to her daughter in a way all parents ultimately are, though no parent can forsee the fate of their own children quite like Louise Banks.

This is no pure passivity on Banks’s part. She capacitates the future by submitting to it, even purchasing a salad bowl with her daughter’s father, which she knows will accidentally wound her daughter’s head and require stitching. Most of us are geared toward avoiding accidents, yet the durational unfolding of her daughter’s life means more with the accident and subsequent comfort among the family than without it. That event is part of the story and crucial for storying. Having her daughter and losing her is more consequential to Banks than not ever encountering such feelings, events, or engagements. The alien abduction into heptapod literacy simply capacitates what has always been present, just waiting to be encountered.

Chiang’s story also references the property of light called Fermat’s principle, which helps explain light refraction, as in the way light bends in water. Light always follows the path that takes the shortest amount of time to traverse. As light moves in water, it slows and takes a different course. To be more accurate, “light always follows an extreme path, either one that minimizes the time taken or the one that maximizes it” (Chiang, 19). Maximums and minimums can be described with a single equation, so the universal appeal of eurowestern physics is not broken. But to take the path of least (or most) time while passing through water, the light would need to know in advance where it will eventually arrive. As one character explains, “The light can’t start travelling in any old direction and make course corrections later on, because the path resulting from such behavior wouldn’t be the fastest possible route” (24). Fermat’s principle is teleological instead of causal. The future destination, the pathway, and the photon’s plot are all set from the moment it begins.

Fermat’s principle is a linguistic breakthrough for Dr. Banks. She observes one alien writing Heptapod B and notices how a certain “stroke participated in several different clauses of the message” (23). She explains,

It began in the semagrams for ‘oxygen,’ as the determinant that distinguished it from certain other elements; then it slid down to become the morpheme of comparison in the description of the two moons’ sizes; and lastly it flared out as the arched backbone of the semagram for ‘ocean.’ Yet this stroke was a continuous single line, and it was the first one that Flapper wrote. That meant the heptapod had to know how the entire sentence would be laid out before it could write the very first stroke. (Chiang 23)

And this wasn’t the only such stroke. Others constituted parts of multiple clauses, “making them so interconnected that none could be removed without redesigning the entire sentence” (23). The only comparison Dr. Banks had was to the highly planned intricacies of Arabic calligraphy, not anything that could be composed on the spot. Heptapod B only works if you know exactly what you will have already said and all the consequences of its saying.

What this may suggest for rhetoric is how universal and unidirectional temporal frames constrain consequences of utterances. The very measures of rhetoric affect the way discourse unfolds through time. Science educator Wolff-Michael Roth shows us something similar in what he calls “postconstructivism.” He theorizes learning as an “event*-in-the-making,” with this asterisk denoting that we are never entirely sure whether the event is completed or still unfolding. In short, he resists the hermeneutical emplotment of events. He analyzes a lesson “from the perspective of the participating witness and through the theoretical lens of the event*-in-the-making—that is, without reducing what is happening to one of the moments of an (al)ready-made event accomplished and named only after the fact” (31). In this, he describes a teacher and a group of students who have looked at “mystery objects” of three-dimensional geometric shapes to learn about those shapes and geometric principles. One teacher, presumably, begins to ask a student, “What is that shape?” but Roth stops his analysis before “assuming that she has already asked a question—which already will have brought our cultural competence into play without marking it as such” (33). It is only in the student’s response to “What is that shape?” that the event*’s “internal forces and relations” are revealed (33). This keeps the event* open to possibilities so that “the eventness of the event, its very mobility, is characterized by the simultaneous disappearance (death) and appearance (birth) of possibilities in and through the actualization of possibilities” (33). The learner and, importantly, the measure of learning—the pedagogical apparatus Roth describes—are neither appropriated nor appropriating on the basis of the same. Interpretation interrupted; a deferment of hermeneutics before the exposition of being.

As Roth shows, our agency and our pedagogical efforts might be inadequate if concentrated on perfecting the hermeneutic blueprints to work from. We can instead focus on the relations we cultivate and the inventional possibilities we wish to obtain through our own measuring tools. Chiang’s story can be read as such a cultivation of possibilities. Banks does not open to a pre-determined answer but to as many possible answers as she can. She refuses to possess and measure her daughter’s life by simply encountering it. She does so in both the story and the film through continual interruption of her hermeneutical sensibilities as her future memories of her daughter come upon her. In this way, Chiang’s protagonist exhibits what Davis argues about hermeneutics, that it “cannot account for the Other at all, cannot attend to radical alterity—it can at best suffer it as an interruption” (Inessential Solidarity 84). Similarly, Roth’s postconstructivism takes meaning-making as itself suffering interruption for the sake of encountering learning. Through an interruption of meaning, a learner can open to more of her own possible and potential answers.

If we were to map the death of Banks’s daughter onto learning, we traditionally arrive at the failure of a plan—a terrible mistake. Banks does not use what is available to her to save her daughter’s life. She does not demonstrate an awareness of the possibly persuasive, but a passive acquiescence to the future status quo. She fails as a mother by this measure of learning. Of course, this exposes the horrible ethics involved in thinking of failure as such, and I think that is precisely why Banks’s foreknowledge turns our attention to just how well she actually succeeds. Divorce, death, teenage anger, and resentment cannot be measures of parental failure nor of a moral failure in living a life. They are encounters that, although terrible in their duration, expose the means available to heal and flourish.

This story serves as a useful way to think about rhetoric in a pluriverse. What is rhetorically available and possible in this ontological multiplicity is not a persuasive proof lying about and waiting to be seized in a shared opportune instant. It is only encountered and invoked through a rhetor’s openness and attunement to her suspension between past and future, and on terms that may be utterly alien. These ways call upon us something radically other and ultimately unknowable, scrambling our conceptual grids, yet we depend on these grids for the rhetorical practices of ongoing good living.

Energy, Change, and Being (in a Relational Ontology)

Chiang’s story can be read as ultimately psychological, which hampers its extension to new materialisms and could lead us back to hermeneutics. We thus need to consider how non-human things may be bound up with similar processes where futures impinge on the present.  Karen Barad’s physics allows for this. Because time is not a linear arrow, all the makings of non-human agentive forces are open to continual revision. It is not a case that the past sets up the present and then the present sets up the future, sequentially, since that reinscribes a universal paradigm. Rather, like the baseball game, the future is held in potential among various actants and their relations.

Arguing that relations precede relata, Barad’s agential realism “refuses the representationalist fixation on words and things and the problematic of the nature of their relationship, advocating instead a relationality between specific material (re)configurings of the world through which boundaries, properties, and meanings are differentially enacted (i.e., discursive practices . . . ) and specific material phenomena . . . (Meeting the Universe 139). In short, relations shape the ways in which things can be configured. As Barad argues, before something exists, it is a set of virtual relations, still ontologically indeterminate. This doesn’t mean something can become just anything. It is not an invitation to radical relativism. Whales do not spontaneously turn into saucepans. But there is a potential for becoming that cannot be determined at the outset. In Barad’s terms, these differential configurings are materialized through “an agential cut—a resolution of the ontological indeterminacy” (175) and a collapse of the virtual into the actual.

Cuts are also stitchings together. As she says in “Transmaterialities: Trans*/Matter/Realities and Queer Political Imaginings,” “Intra-actions enact cuts that cut (things) together-apart (one move)” (406). Because these are intra-actions, they go both ways and neither agent has complete dominance. Agential cuts are always temporary resolutions of traces left by other Beings. Through response-abilities that allow for discernment between a “this” and a “that,” virtual differences are made actual, each agential being contributing to relative stabilization.

Throughout Barad’s article, we are also given short explanations of electricity: galvanism, lightning formation, “membrane voltage in Xenopus (frog) embryos” (qtd. in Barad “Transmaterialities” 404). With respect to the latter, Barad relates an experiment done with frog embryos where an electric pattern of ions precedes the morphological development of embyronic features. This electrostatic field results from the excited play of multiple virtualities as they work out the actual development of the facial features of the tadpole to come, as a video from Tufts University demonstrates. Dr. Dany Adams, one of the molecular biologists who first captured the discovery on video, is clear that she aims to exploit this process “to really control it at the genetic level” (0:11).

Whereas the researchers propose controlling the process, my focus is on the ontology of the process itself irrespective of human intervention and manipulation. A material actualization is anticipated through the release of energetic particles. In short, these features do not arrive at an instantaneous moment. This is not an electric field produced by a singularity yet to arrive but by the many gathered cellular intra-actions forwarding a capacity for emergence along particular lines, like an invitation. Barad argues that this is evidence of “matter’s ongoing experimenting with itself—the queer dance of being-time indeterminacy, the imaginative play of presence/absence, here/there, now then, that holds the disparate parts together-apart” (“Transmaterialities” 407). Along with flashes of plasma preceding lightning strikes, “Both the becoming of lightning and the becoming of face exhibit flashes that mark out the traces of (what might yet) be-coming” (407). The full range of play may be latent in any particular relation, but playful realization out of the “queer dance” comes from the virtual play of/with possible futures. In short, Barad shows how the future arrives differentially and not all at once. Baseball unfolds from a distance, Banks’s daughter is hurt and healed as part of a longer story; electromagetic waves invite material actualization.

Such inventive play is always at work, at many scales, and, of course across the virtual relations of any exposition. Barad does not reserve this signaling for the merely quantum or atomic realms. Instead, Barad argues that this scales up since “[t]he electric body—at all scales, atmospheric, subatomic, molecular, organismic—is a quantum phenomenon generating new imaginaries, new lines of research, new possibilities” (“Transmaterialities” 411). In a footnote, she clarifies, “Scale does not precede phenomena; scale is only materialized/ defined within particular phenomena” (422, n 65). Like Andrew Pilsch’s “scalar derangement,” the pluriversal temporalities I point out here are useful in conceiving possible rhetorical means to work with alien encounters of many kinds.

For a ghostly instant, the future impinges into the present. In the duration between different sensory temporalities, it is not just that we don’t know for certain what will resolve. There is a similarity between the electric face and the sight of a ball whizzing away before either the material form or sonic vibrations arrive in the unfolding movement and duration of a temporal encounter that we straighten and order into a singular event. The what-could-be out of incalculable relations is prefigured in the play of this virtuality, an early arrival that does not yet predestine its realization.

Let us be cautious though. We might conceive of rhetoric as force or energy moving through a medium of relations and thus see rhetoric’s practical concerns focused on how that energy might be directed in an actual sense. This seems to be the hope of the molecular biologists—a specific affordance that can be made to achieve specific, pre-determined outcomes. The idea of rhetoric as directed or transmitted energy is not new. George Kennedy intimated that this was Aristotle’s idea of rhetoric “in the most general sense, . . . the energy inherent in emotion and thought, transmitted through a system of signs, including language, to others to influence their decisions or actions” (3). Kennedy construes energy as external to us and reinscribes the linear mechanisms of eurowestern causes and effects. How might we think of rhetorical energy not as some power directed by an(other) agent, but multiple energies whose power flows because we are entangled in a medium of relations, both actual and potential? We are not always in control of those energies, though we are always potentially subject to them.

Barad relies on a virtual plane of existence to explain “particles that correspond to the quantum fluctuation of the vacuum, that are there and are not there as a result of the time-being indeterminacy relation” (“Transmaterialities” 395). Virtual particles are a continuous multiplicity that is not opposed to the real but is not always materially actualized. For example, an electron is an actual particle “devoid of structure” that cannot be isolated in its indeterminate being because it “is always (already) intra-acting with the virtual particles of the vacuum in all possible ways” (399). Not only is there an infinite set of possibilities for its continual intra-action with other things, but also infinite varieties of itself/itselves as a virtual and material thing. In Barad’s words, the intra-actions that give rise to the electron “entail particle transitions from one kind to another in a radical undoing of kinds – queer/trans*formations” (399)^[3]. And this re-orders our way of thinking ontology so that “[e]ach ‘individual’ always already includes all possible intra-actions with ‘itself’ through all possible virtual others, including those (and itself) that are noncontemporaneous with itself. That is, finite being is always already threaded through with an infinite alterity diffracted through being and time" (401, italics in original). Becoming is not simply sequential exposition but a recursive play of virtual possibilities along relational encounters in duration. Louise Banks shows us this by retaining the available possibilities for her daughter’s life, bruises from salad bowls and all. The actual becomes (and undoes itself) through these possibilities, selecting out of, as it were, the incalculable virtual potential of the pluriverse with innumerable others who exceed us in all spatiotemporal directions.

The point is how so many other things are required for one thing to happen. In the frog embryo, an electric field forms out of cellular intra-actions as a multiplicity rather than singularity. It is the arrival of a form in an event unbounded until it actualizes. The face is only virtually present until other intra-actions catch up, thus completing the arrival. The temporal frames of ionic energy are different from the frames of material cellular division, arriving before the physical can structure itself, yet they are of the same unfolding, durational movement. Each agential being is a potential rhetor with no singular master, and the whole affair relies on furthering a capacity of what is yet to come. As with Louise Banks’s Heptapod literacy, the frog face is an anticipatory memory of the future, a ghostly future in the process of being born, and its story is yet to be told not by individuals, but by a community. What remains from this is not a line of history, but its spreading out like a frosty pattern, intersecting with patterned traces of other lives, perhaps even diffracting other beings that, like light, pass through it.

Indigenous Time

Having drawn so far mainly on eurowestern imaginaries, philosophies, and science, I want to show how these are not incompatible with decolonial projects and may actually advocate those projects as an allied conception of pluriversal rhetorics. In his book Beyond Settler Time, Mark Rifkin amplifies Scott Lyons’s phrase “temporal multiplicity” to indicate “the copresence of varied ways of living time, the coexistence of temporal formations that cannot be assessed against a presumptively modern present” (16). He argues for “Indigenous temporal sovereignty,” which “functions less as an effort to challenge juridicial sovereignty than as a means of indexing the multiplicity of ways that time both operates as a vector of settler colonialism and expresses Indingeous self-determination” (185). Temporal sovereignty “seeks to increase the possibilities for articulating and analyzing ways of experiencing time that do not depend on inclusion within settler modes of experience, backgrounding, and orientation” (186-187). Rifkin argues for the temporalities of multiple communities, traditions, and self-constitutions, each differentially subjected under the singular temporal measure of settler colonial practices.

Temporal multiplicity is, Rifkin argues, not simply relative but attentive to the very frames as different and differentiating of lived time. “If,” he argues, “frames of reference cannot be determined and measured against ‘objective’ criteria, and the attempt to do so can be understood as itself an imposition of settler time, then we might turn to perception as a way of approaching Indingeous temporal formations” (27). As with the baseball, Davis’s response-ability, Banks’s daughter, and Barad’s agential cuts, one’s relation with difference matters. Rifkin finds Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological perception “guided by the potential for action in the world” as one way to understand a perceived sense of time (27).

This is not action pre-determined by purpose or intent but, as Rifkin quotes Merleau-Ponty, a “process of ‘reckon[ing] with an environment,’ engaging it as a ‘field of possibility’” (28). Clear that “Native frames of reference are neither inherently liberatory nor transcendent” (188), Rifkin sees Native storying as politically feasible frames for perceptions entwined with “dynamics of being and becoming [that] register the duration of relations with a people’s homeland(s) as well as ongoing histories of displacement by non-natives, various life cycles and rhythms (ritual and not), and sustained connections to other-than-human entities and processes” (187). Temporal sovereignty makes available further potential and capacity for storying worlds.

Story is not narrative. As he asks, “What kinds of collective sensations, perceptions, historical accounts, engagements with nonhuman actors, and the like vanish, are subordinated, or are badly distorted when translated into dominant settler frames of reference?” (186). This is inventive; as Rifkin explains, “What was does not provide a set pattern, like a mold, for what will or could be. Rather, the exertion of temporal sovereignty in the face of a history of settler violence and displacement consists in an ongoing re-creation oriented by an engagement with the historical density -- the ‘pieces’ -- of collective identity and experience” (32). Ultimately, Rifkin sees how “Indigenous duration operates less as a chronological sequence than as overlapping networks of affective connection (to persons, nonhuman entities, and place) that orient one’s way of moving through space and time, with story as a crucial part of that process” (46). Such movements through space and time are often exceptional to settler knowledge, labelled as instances of savage violence, absence, superstition, and prophecy rather than taken on their own terms. Yet stories and the capacity to story one’s own encounters come to matter in Rifkin’s take on indigenous temporality and its impact on pluriversal politics.

If we understand Rifkin’s sense of temporal multiplicity as ultimately necessitating not epistemic identification, ontological flattening, or transversal abstraction—all of which may reduce the multiplicity against a measure or axis of the same—but as a risky, messy, and flawed politics of making and sharing stories, then our notions of what may be possibly persuasive are still bounded by certain capacities and potentials. They are also highly dependent upon the manner of encounter and admission of the story, its emplotment, and the storyteller herself. Each aspect of storying arises and arrives in its own time and our response-ability between these durational moments matters. Foreclose any of these too soon, appropriate to one’s own hermeneutic frame —refuse to buy that salad bowl—and some capacity is diminished. Tomorrow may need something that seems inconsequential today.

Coda

To conclude, I want to emphasize that we have a response-ability to futures that are too large to show up all at once and so creep in on their own self-appointed pace. We are the endekhomenon pithanon of Aristotle’s rhetoric and object of Heidegger’s handenheit, fashioning possibilities with and for others, modulating the ways a future anterior—the what will have been—takes form. We do so by holding open possibilities for differential arrivals of quasi-objects rather than foreclosing them by quick standards of the status quo. We can refuse an easy transposition between pluriversal phenomena to make for a world in which one savors the diverse ephemerality of living, the energy of interruptive encounters, and the salty tang of a difference that cannot be assimilated to one’s own conceptual or material framework yet still allows for co-existence. We might ponder this through temporal reorientations and recognitions that reveal pluriversal possibilities. Any particular moment will necessarily be subject to arrivals of all sorts and to an incalculable number of agential frames, all of which continually (re)define the moment in their event*ful becoming.